<anglebrackets/> conference in Orlando

09.04.2014

First things first. This time the conference took place in a beautiful JW Marriott Grande Lakes hotel in the very center of Orlando. There were about 5 to 6 conferences going on at once and each of them took place in a beautiful large conference room.

The conference itself included two main topics Angular Js and ASP.NET. So you could choose between the ones that interested you the most. Of course there were some other smaller topics like "Introduction to Twitter Bootstrap", "Making HTML5 Work Everywhere" or for example "What’s Your Job Anyway?" where they discussed some hard-edged opinions about what's wrong with modern development practices such as agile/extreme methodologies, pattern overuse, zero-defect philosophy, code centric decision making, and other activities that don’t do a good job of balancing cost and benefit.

But as I already mentioned - main focus was to Angular JS and ASP.NET technologies. Since I'm studying Back-End bases I chose the second option. Of course you might think that these things might be a little too complicated if you don't have enough previous experience and some of them indeed were quite messy, but most of them described some basic things from the very bottom level like "One ASP.NET" by Jessy Liberty, that teaches all you need to know about the elements of programming with ASP.NET, including Web Forms, MVC, AJAX, Web Pages, Web API and SignalR. Of course you don't become an expert after attending his lecture but it really gets you on the right track, inspires to develop and points to things you need to study the most.

Of course the very stars of the conference were the most recognised leaders and experts in the industry like Scott Hanselman, John Papa, Scott Guthrie, Douglas Crockford, Elijah Manor and Denise Jacobs.

It's really an incredible experience to visit one of their lectures and get inspired from such people like Douglas Crockford - the inventor of JSON or of course Scott Hanselman - who has the unique ability to perform serious complicated things in a very easy and in many places hilarious ways. And in fact it's true - if there is a lecture with Scott Hanselman - all the other conference rooms are practically empty.

So in general my impression and feeling about the conference is really positive. It definitely is better then the O'Reilly fluent conference in San Francisco we attended last year. Most of the speakers were really experienced and easy to comprehend but the best part of course was to see all these experts in real life, to have a quick chat with them, ask some questions and of course get inspired from them.

Lets not forget that the main purpose of the conference is not making you an expert in a few days, it's to show you how many things there are still to study, to inspire you to go further, keep developing, exploring new stuff and taking only the best practise from the most experienced leaders out there.

"I made every mistake with JavaScript you could make!" - Douglas Crockford.